NTT DOCOMO, who apparently changed their name from the difficult to type, but aesthetically pleasing DoCoMo, has licensed their LTE-PF chipset design to MediaTek, the Taiwanese firm who designs chips that go into million of Chinese mobile phones that are mostly clones of what’s sold in the West.
What exactly is LTE-PF? As seen in the shaded area above, it’s LTE communication software and the LTE baseband hardware. LTE-PF is a joint project that combines the talents of DOCOMO, NEC Casio (the joint mobile business in Japan), Panasonic, and Fujitsu. It’s the stuff that lets LTE devices talk to LTE networks. Now when a company wants to make an LTE device they’ll have LTE smarts from NTT DOCOMO and if they choose to, a 3G/2G baseband from someone else, all on a chip designed by MediaTek and popped out of some foundry, probably TSMC, before finally being shoved into a NOKLA. Now will such a dual baseband device ever hit the market? That’s difficult to tell. Qualcomm is insanely popular right now in the high and mid range smartphone space because they sell complete system on chip (SoC) solutions that combing the baseband (modem), applications processor (Snapdragon), and all the WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS you can handle.
Then there’s the question of who does one pay in terms of patent royalties when shipping an LTE device, but that’s another post all together, and probably one I’ll never write since the patent scene makes me want to pull a Hemingway and take a shotgun to my face.
The goal of this deal, as always for companies from the Japanese mobile industry, is to escape their little tiny of Japan and hit in big time in the international arena. All those fancy Japanese mobile phones … they never ship anywhere else, and it’s a damn shame as far as we’re concerned.